Described below is a method of network selection, in particular for wireless local area networks, such as IEEE 802.11. In a wireless environment with overlapping networks (i.e. network coverage is provided by more than one operator), a wireless terminal needs to choose a network access point, such as an Access Point (AP) or Base Station (BS), to handover to, if mobility within the system is required, or change to a different network if the one it is currently with cannot provide the service it requires. Current IEEE 802.11 wireless systems support the periodic broadcast, or probing of network identity, and other characteristics, that can be used by mobile terminals (MTs) to detect network coverage and to assess which access point they would like to connect to having made their network selection. However, it is not mandatory for access points to provide this information (unless responding to an information request directed explicitly towards their network identity), and indeed, in some cases they are configured not to reply, for security and radio resource reasons. Therefore, MTs may not be able to detect all available points of attachment in a certain area. In addition, the information provided in a beacon from the access point does not provide much information about the characteristics of the network to support network selection. Future standardization is expected to add some additional information about network provision within IEEE 802.11 (Task Group u). However, one of the current problems with these state of the art techniques is that many messages are required to complete a neighborhood scan, e.g. many IEEE 802.11 probe/response messages, together with possible re-tuning to scan all available channels. In the future IEEE 802.11y system, the number of channels may expand considerably and this current technique does not scale well in terms of the time taken to achieve the complete scan of all possible neighbors.